After the New York Online critics, New York Film Critics Circle as well as the San Francisco Film Critics Circle all named Julie Christie Best Actress Marion Cotillard’s name shows up in the list of nominees by 2 other Critics Associations:

Chicago Film Critics Association (source):
Best Actress – Nominations
Julie Christie – “Away From Her”
Marion Cotillard – “La Vie En Rose”
Angelina Jolie – “A Mighty Heart”
Laura Linney – “The Savages”
Ellen Page – “Juno”

Winners of the 2007 Chicago Film Critics Awards will be announced Friday by entertainment reporter and critic Dean Richards during the morning newscast on WGN-TV Channel 9.

Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards (source)
Best Actress – Nominations
Amy Adams – “Enchanted”
Cate Blanchett – “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”
Julie Christie – “Away From Her”
Marion Cotillard – “La Vie en Rose”
Angelina Jolie – “A Mighty Heart”
Ellen Page – “Juno”

The 13th annual awards will be presented during a live VH1 broadcast Jan. 7, with D.L. Hughley as host. The Broadcast Film Critics Association is the largest film critics’ organization, comprising more than 200 North American members representing TV, radio and online critics.

Both Critics Associations also nominated La Vie en Rose itself for Best Foreign Language Film.

from E! Online / by Marc Malkin

“Champagne.”

That’s how Marion Cotillard plans to celebrate her Golden Globe nomination. “I am really enjoying every minute and second of it!”

Cotillard is on the phone with me from Paris, where she says she didn’t find out she was nominated for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy (for her remarkable turn as the late Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose) until two hours after it was announced.

“It was not the morning here for me,” Cotillard says of the official announcement that took place at about 5:30 a.m. PST. “The announcement was like 2 p.m. here, so I was in the middle of something at my friend’s house. I listened to my voicemail, and my agent had left me a message like an hour before!”

The news is even sweeter for the 32-year-old first-time nominee, because she is “a French actress, and this is a French movie.”

No doubt Cotillard will be wearing a dress from one of her favorites—Jean-Paul Gaultier and Chanel are at the top of her list—on the red carpet. “I don’t know yet, because I didn’t want to think about this before today,” she says. “I’m sure by tomorrow we’ll be working on this.”

Cotillard’s competition includes Amy Adams (Enchanted), Nikki Blonsky (Hairspray), Helena Bonham Carter (Sweeney Todd) and Ellen Page (Juno).

So, what does she think Piaf would make of all this?

“She would laugh,” Cotillard says. “She was laughing all the time.”

This Sunday indeed is a happy day – well, for me it’s already a new day – since also the Los Angeles Film Critics Association have chosen Marion Cotillard for their Best Actress award! Congratulations!

Runner-up was Anamaria Marinca for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”. Read The Hollywood Reporter article on the winners etc.

Awards season is in full swing and the various Film Critics Circles and Societies are announcing their winners – considered Oscar precursors. Yesterday afternoon, the Boston Society of Film Critics announced their winners and Marion Cotillard was named Best Actress! Congratulations! Read the Variety report on the winners.

Scott Feinberg posted a blog entry with information about what was going on behind the scenes: how the winners were determined and, since no runner-ups were announced, who/what else was in contention.

Marion Cotillard won Best Actress handily on the second ballot. Apparently, the only others with any real support at all were Julie Christie and Ellen Page.

And the always informative blog Marion Cotillard’s Road to Oscar is pointing out that Marion is the first actress from a foreign language film to be awarded by the BSFC since 1982.

Variety has a new article/interview where we can find out more about Marion Cotillard’s passion for musicals and that the original concept for La Vie en Rose was even more that of a musical. Be sure to read it.

“My dream is to be in a musical. I was taken with the singing and tap dancing. As a little girl, I wanted to play Annie. She was my hero. I still love that movie. I’d watch it again.”

from Variety / by Robert Hofler

Regardless of what the French think of Yanks, they love American movies — and Marion Cotillard is no exception. Even though she first acted onstage as a 4-year-old child with her thesp parents, the actress got the real urge to perform from a most unlikely cinematic source.

“A major movie moment from my childhood is John Huston’s ‘Annie,’” she says of the 1989 film adaptation of the enormously popular legit show. Cotillard, in fact, says she could sing “Tomorrow” forever.

“My dream is to be in a musical. I was taken with the singing and tap dancing. As a little girl, I wanted to play Annie. She was my hero. I still love that movie. I’d watch it again.”

“Annie” was soon followed by repeats of “Singin’ in the Rain” on French TV.

“On that one, I actually watched it again and again and learned the choreography, and tried to do it in front of the TV.”

Cotillard makes a passing reference to the French musicals “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort” by New Wave director Jacques Demy. “But it’s not in the French culture to do musicals,” she observes, a little miffed.

Fortunately for her, “La Vie en rose,” in essence, is a musical, since much of the story is told through the songs of Edith Piaf, whom Cotillard essays. According to the actress, the 2007 biopic was even more tuner-like in its early drafts of the script.

“For example, at the beginning of the movie, where Piaf is young and living with the prostitutes, the first draft (of the script) had the prostitutes singing, like in a musical,” she recalls. There would ultimately be budget constraints that would make that impossible, yet “you can feel that concept of a musical.”

Cotillard had wanted to sing her own vocals in the film, but a decision was made to lip-sync the Piaf songs instead.

“I started to take singing lessons, but when we realized we had only three months to prepare the movie, it was absolutely obvious that I wouldn’t be able to record the songs,” she says.

Cotillard did sing her own songs for the music-business comedy “Les jolies choses” but doesn’t even venture a critique of her own ability.

“It’s so hard to judge one’s own voice,” she explains.

FAST FACTS

Favorite film: “I can’t pick one. I love all the Charlie Chaplin movies. I love ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ I love ‘Sophie’s Choice.’ Meryl Streep is great. ‘The Lives of Others’ is a masterpiece.”

What you want in a director: “Passion, confidence — a real need to say something — and sharing. But passion is most important.”

Vice: “Chocolate.”

I don’t know about you but I just love hearing what people from within the film industry say about their colleagues. So here some more quotes I found:

And Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose. I think that’s one of the most extraordinary performances I’ve ever seen.

by Keira Knightley, source

Diva expert Charles Busch has channeled everyone from Joan Crawford to Judy Garland into his plays, including Off Broadway’s current “Die Mommie Die!” He calls Edith Piaf one of his favorite femme icons.”I’m always leery to see a movie about someone I know a lot about,” Busch cautions, “but I was fascinated with ‘La Vie en rose.’ What fascinates people about Garland and Piaf is their fragility and their tragedy. With both of them, what we really respond to is this triumph of will, the fragile, wounded person who somehow belts out the huge note and survives another comeback. It’s an incredible movie with a brilliant performance from Marion Cotillard.”

by Charles Busch, source

‘You and Me‘ – one of my favourite Marion Cotillard movies – is being shown at the 11th Annual Festival of New French Cinema in Chicago this Saturday, December 8th at 9pm. Buy tickets online.

On a less happier note, Marion Cotillard’s performance in La Vie en Rose was not acknowledged when the winners of this year’s National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Awards were announced yesterday. Julie Christie (Away From Her) was named Best Actress and Ellen Page (Juno) received the Breakthrough Award. The film itself was named one of the Top 5 Foreign Films though. NBR Awards have no commercial ties to the motion-picture industry and support film, domestic and foreign, as both art and entertainment.

There is a new interview with Marion Cotillard featured with today’s issue of The Los Angeles Times: it can be found in a Special magazine called The Envelope in Print: The Music Issue. If anyone can get a copy of it and send in scans – or tell me how I can aquire it – I’d be more than happy!

Read the interview here.

Also, Marion Cotillard made #2 on Vogue’s 10 Best Dressed of the Week list. It was her appearance at the Gotham Awards that caught their attention – and deservedly so!

from The Los Angeles Times / by William Georgiades

Marion Cotillard can’t escape Edith Piaf, nor is she trying to: She’s enjoying it.

NEW YORK — MARION Cotillard has appeared in more than 40 movies, including Tim Burton’s “Big Fish,” Ridley Scott’s “A Good Year,” Luc Besson’s “Taxi” movies and, most recently, “La Vie en Rose,” in which she played Edith Piaf. That performance has been generating Oscar buzz since before it was released in June. It’s an astonishing feat of metamorphosis — Cotillard managed to appear a foot shorter than she is to play the French singer and icon, and though she is 32, she plays Piaf convincingly from age 17 to her death at 47.

In person, in a midtown hotel here, she is lovely, elegant and low-key enough to request hot water from a waiter, producing her own bags of green tea.

You’ve been talking about “La Vie en Rose” for more than two years now. You’ve been in more than 40 movies, but it sometimes seems this is the only film you’ve done.

I shaved back my hairline and shaved off my eyebrows back in September 2005 and we started shooting in January last year and started the promotion shortly after that, so, yes, I have been living with this role for over two years now. But I’m really enjoying all the adventure so I can’t complain. Sometimes you get the same questions over and over, but you just have to laugh about it. It’s pretty easy to handle.

And there will be an end to it all. In February?

Yes.

So do you have your Oscar acceptance speech rehearsed yet?

No! I’m not working on any speech. We really have to wait and see if I even get a nomination. That would be something huge for me. When I even say this, it makes me laugh, like what am I even talking about. I could never have imagined that one day I would talk seriously about Oscars. I’m just very happy for the movie.

You were in New York just three years ago to study English.

Yes, I came here right after I did “Big Fish” with Tim Burton, where I had a very hard time understanding people. So I took a Berlitz course for a few weeks and I’ve been practicing ever since.

Your parents are both actors and you started working very young.

I did work when I was 5 because one of my parents’ friends was about to direct a TV movie and asked me to be a part of it. But then I did have a very normal childhood. Without explaining it to me, I understood that to be an actor you have to live your life and go through normal joy and normal pain because an actor is telling people stories and you have to live normally to know how it works in real life, and then when I was 18 I started to work again. Just before playing Edith Piaf, you played the love interest to Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s “A Good Year.”

How was working with those two?

I’d been told of Russell Crowe’s reputation, but he’s really the nicest guy. And I’m not doing an American-type promotion. He really wanted people to be happy on the set, and he would do anything to make you at ease.

You’ve said that in playing Piaf you didn’t want to imitate her, that you wanted to express her.

It’s not interesting to imitate someone who existed in real life. You have all the information about this person and you have to understand them. That is what’s interesting. So I think that Jamie Foxx (as Ray Charles) or Will Smith (as Muhammad Ali) or Joaquin Phoenix (as Johnny Cash), I’m sure they didn’t try to imitate because that’s technical. I had to learn cello for another movie and it was mechanical to learn the cello, but the fun part is when the mechanical part is all in your hands and you can play with the emotions.

You only sing in one small part of “La Vie en Rose,” when your character is drunk, but you’ve sung before, and your next project “The Nine,” directed by Frank Marshall and co-starring Javier Bardem, is a musical, yes?

Oh, yes, I love to sing! But I couldn’t sing like Edith Piaf and with three months to prepare, I wouldn’t have had time to have her voice. And I’ve been practicing my songs for “The Nine.” It’s good to sing, music is a good way to enjoy life. You see people in the street listening to music but you don’t see them walking with a movie. You can take music everywhere!